Work woes
Saturday, December 16th, 2006I’m meant to be doing some (virtual) overtime this weekend, but first I need to connect to the CVS servers (to pick up all of yesterday’s code changes) over the VPN and everything appears to be down. VPN claims to connect, but I can’t reach the forum, wiki, fisheye, file or CVS servers. Pah!
Update 03-Jan-2007: There was a fire at a substation leading to black outs across Birmingham and by Saturday evening only a few buildings were still affected - but my little troubles were obviously vastly less than those of the sea life centre next door.
. Weirdly the laptop, despite having a slower processor, seems faster than my work PC - I guess it is definitely time for a reinstall at work.
This evening a colleague phones up - he’s working at a customer site and getting in his words “the dreaded NullPointerException”, fairy nuff it’s a bug so not good, but why dreaded? The bug fixes I love are normally those where the stacktrace shows a NPE (in a class I have source code for) with a line number, normally from there you can easily find which object(s) have potentially been assigned a null value and backtrack to find where they were supposed to be allocated. Far better than some wrapped exception where the programmer has ‘helpfully’ masked the real problem. Of course once you’ve tracked down where the null is coming from it is a good idea to convert the code so that if null is not a valid assignment it either prevents the null result completely or complains then and there.